Up and down life's dial

Tom Ashbrook, who's bringing his 'On Point' radio show to T.O., has led a life rife with variety

Tom Ashbrook has led the colorful life. He’s the Illinois farm boy who went to Yale, and worked as a roustabout and dynamiter in the Alaska wilds to pay those Ivy League bills.

He roamed China and much of the Pacific as a correspondent and later bureau chief for The Boston Globe — once moonlighting, while in Hong Kong, dubbing kung fu films into English and international editions.

Today, Ashbrook hosts the “On Point” radio program that airs every weekday morning on National Public Radio stations across the country, including KCLU in Thousand Oaks.

Hear National Public Radio host Tom Ashbrook talk and take part in a taping of his "On Point" radio show starting at 8 p.m. Saturday at Civic Arts Plaza, 2100 E. Thousand Oaks Blvd. Ashbrook and crew will tape an edition of "On Point," with the audience as participants, that will air Monday; the scheduled topic is California's green economy, its prospects and what the country can learn from it. Afterward, Ashbrook will talk about public radio.

Tom Ashbrook's "On Point" airs at 9 a.m. weekdays and repeats at 9 p.m. on KCLU, which can be found at 88.3 FM or 1340 AM on your radio (also 102.3 FM in Santa Barbara). For more on that, including another way to listen, visit http://www.kclu.org.

It’s a comfortable chair now, broadcasting from the WBUR studios in Boston. But it began totally by the seat of the pants, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. NPR honchos called the station wanting new horses in the field, its staffers running on exhaustion. WBUR knew Ashbrook from his Globe days and called him with the news.

“I went in on a Sunday afternoon and they said, ‘Can you go on two nights a week nationally, starting tomorrow?’” Ashbrook recalled recently from his home in Newton, Mass. “I thought, ‘Holy smokes, I can’t believe this, but here we go.’ I’d never done radio before.”

Ashbrook, 53, will experience another first Saturday night when he brings “On Point” to the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. It’s the first time he’s brought the show to Southern California, and KCLU is a fitting choice. It was the first West Coast station to pick up “On Point,” a fact not lost on Ashbrook.

“We have a special bond with them because of that,” he said, “and we do not forget.”

It promises to be an interesting evening. Ashbrook and crew will tape an “On Point” show during the first part that will air on NPR on Monday. The planned topic, Ashbrook said, is California’s green economy, its prospects and what the country can learn from it.

Instead of throwing the phone lines open to the nation as usual, Saturday night’s Civic Arts Plaza audience will be the ones commenting and asking questions, Ashbrook indicated. Then, after the show’s mics have been turned off, Ashbrook will spend another hour talking about public radio.

KCLU General Manager Mary Olson, who will introduce Ashbrook on Saturday, called him “hands down one of the finest interviewers on radio and TV, period.”

“He is immensely popular, he’s smart and his guests are top-notch,” said Olson.

Jim Rondeau, the station’s operations and programming director, found Ashbrook’s show, Olson noted. KCLU began airing “On Point” in January 2004, in an evening slot.

“We put it on and we had such an overwhelming response to him,” Olson recalled.

In September 2005, KCLU moved “On Point” to a more desirable morning slot. Now, it airs from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. weekdays, immediately after NPR’s “Morning Edition.” Following it, Ashbrook holds the morning drive audience, said Olson, noting that’s a rarity in radio.

KCLU is one of more than 160 NPR stations nationwide that carry “On Point.”

Dichotomy of a show

Eight-plus years into it, Ashbrook is thankful for the baptism-by-fire that 9/11’s aftermath provided. It instilled “that attitude of putting everything into it right from the get-go with no second thoughts.”

“It put something into the show’s DNA that’s still there today — a something that doesn’t want to just shoot the breeze,” he said.

“On Point” is on live, from 10 a.m. to noon, on many Eastern time zone stations.

The show’s motto, as Ashbrook states on its Web site, is “on our toes, out front, at the heart of what’s going on.” He wants people, both guests and callers, to open up their hearts and minds on issues.

They’re all here — Afghanistan, health care reform, Obama’s performance, the feeble economy, the poor job market for college graduates, bank bailouts and big bonuses, the swine flu, you name it — some of them on a daily basis.

“I think we have a sense of urgency that is appropo to the times,” Ashbrook said. “I think we stay with the topics with the type of intensity that takes it somewhere, instead of just passing through.”

People, he said, are looking for a good venue for serious, plugged-in topics and conversation that’s fast-moving, thoughtful and also fun.

It sounds daunting, trying to match up topics and guests on a daily basis, but Ashbrook, who credits a good team of producers behind the scenes, indicated that it’s not.

“People want to be on the show,” he said. “We’ve built a good reputation. NPR is a good brand name for attracting serious, well-spoken guests.

“Plus,” he continued as a laugh built, “we just beat all the bushes until they say yes.”

The first hour is almost always news and issues du jour. But the second hour often delves into literature, history, science, the arts and the offbeat. Authors drop in, and sometimes even Hollywood — “Mad Men” creator-executive producer Matthew Weiner was on recently after his show nabbed more Emmy awards.

Ashbrook is one journalist who’s not afraid to admit that he needs a tonic from all that straight, hard news. The second hour, he said, “almost nourishes my soul.”

“I almost can’t take it when we do hard news all the time,” he said. “We want the show to reflect the richness of life. You can get beat down by the news all the time. And not everything fits into a blazing news story.”

Ashbrook is grateful to have “such a great platform” in a day when fewer and fewer of them exist these days to do “real good journalism.” The show is looking into beefing up its digital formats and developing a weekend presence, but Ashbrook does not think its core mission will change.

Dynamite, dubbing and deadlines

It hasn’t been a bad ride for a “regular farm kid who loved to read and was fascinated by the big world out there.”

Ashbrook was born in 1956 and grew up on a working, family farm near Bloomington, Ill. As he tells it, when he was in his teens, his parents put him on a semi-trailer truck full of hogs and drove east. When they neared Philadelphia, they told their son to “go figure out the world.”

Recalled Ashbrook: “I got off the hog truck, dropped my suitcase to the dirt and started out.”

Eventually, he found Yale. It was, he conceded, “a culture shock for an Illinois farm boy.” He also didn’t have money to afford it.

But, Ashbrook said, “the Alaska pipeline was paying very well in those days. I did a summer up on the north coast as a roustabout, and a long winter down in the Ogilvie Mountains near the Yukon and Porcupine rivers with an oil exploration crew. It was a lot of dynamiting work.”

“All this paid for school, quite well,” he noted.

His colleagues there were “larger-than-life, blue-collar guys.” He recalled working with a famous dynamiter and a bulldozer driver from Oklahoma “day after day in the pitch black of the Alaskan winter.”

“They were salt-of-the-earth guys who had a lot of insights into the world,” Ashbrook said. “Working with them, you see how deep the spirit of this country runs. I carry that with me to this day.”

Back at Yale, he went to divinity school and got hooked on historic writings and texts from India. He spent his junior year studying in India (at Andhra University) “and fell in love with Asia. When I got out of college, all I wanted to do was go back there.”

He got a fellowship to China, where he dubbed those kung fu films, and also got his first journalism job, at the South China Post. From there, he spent five years in Tokyo, Japan, as Asian bureau chief for The Boston Globe.

“I was all over the Pacific,” he said.

In 1988, he came to Boston, where he served as foreign editor and deputy managing editor at The Globe. But in the early 1990s, he began heeding the Internet’s drumbeat and ascertained that “it was going to kill newspapers.” In 1996, a year after doing a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, Ashbrook left The Globe to start up a home-furnishings Internet company with a college friend.

It was a financial success. He left it in 2000 to write a book, “The Leap,” about his Internet venture. He was picking up the pieces from that when NPR called.

Parakeets, pulse reads and perfection

On a typical “On Point” day, Ashbrook is in the Boston studio by about 7 a.m. He and crew have a pre-show meeting where they toss around what they want to get out of both hours. After some last-minute preparations, the red light goes on at 10 a.m. and dies out at noon. Immediately after the show, he and crew go into a planning meeting for the next day’s edition.

Ashbrook gets home in the late afternoon, does “the family thing” for awhile (he has a wife and three kids, two of whom have flown the nest) and by evening, is back into show mode, researching topics from his study.

It was from there that this interview took place, interrupted only by his two noisy parakeets who, unlike the callers on his show, chirped in with comments whenever they felt like it — to great comic effect.

“They keep me awake when I’m doing research at night,” he said with a chuckle.

His microphone could be considered a finger taking the daily pulse of the nation. Ashbrook said we are going through great transition, trying to find our feet in a new era and bring our old ways into it. It’s both frustrating and exciting, he said, and count Ashbrook among the optimists.

“This country has a lot of giant challenges ahead of it, and I have great faith that we will figure it out,” he said. “But it’s going to be some wild times while we do. As a journalist, you couldn’t ask for a better time. As a citizen, you worry sometimes, but I think we are going to find our way.”

On his show the morning of this interview, Cornel West — the Princeton professor, author, philosopher and civil rights activist — called Ashbrook “a force for good.” Ashbrook brushed it off on air, but liked how it sounded later.

“That’s sure as heck what I wanna be, otherwise what’s the point?” he observed. “We have enough people who tear things down. I want to build things up, but not in an uncritical way, mind you.”

As for the perfect interview among the oodles he does, Ashbrook defined it as one “where I learn a lot and I feel my audience does too, and where I’m swept away with insight and epiphany and taken to a new understanding I didn’t have at the top of the hour.”

High standards, indeed. On Saturday night, the Civic Arts Plaza audience can judge his work, up close and a little more personal.